Self+Study


 * Points of Tension: Self Study**

Our assignment that day was to react to a prompt: “Words fail.” It was a challenging idea for a writing class, a tough question for students studying to be teachers. It was September 11, 2001 and I had just started as a freshman at NYU a few days before. That morning I had a view of the still standing, still smoldering towers from my dorm room. I went to my class, World Cultures: India. My professor lectured right through the collapse. I was in a dark, windowless theater when a classmate raised his hand and announced what had happened. With no word from the university, I went to my next class where the professor said, “Words fail. Write.” What do you do with that?

I did particularly poorly that year. I think I was lost. I was barely eighteen and new to New York. I had excelled in high school. I had never worked hard, never studied. I very nearly failed my writing class. I was lost in the bureaucracy of my new, giant school. I was lost in my own mind and expectations.

At NYU, I was studying to be an English teacher. I had decided to become a teacher in kindergarten. I had decided to become an English teacher while in middle school. I had never doubted it. I love teaching. At age thirteen, I was a dance teacher. By fourteen I was teaching second grade religious education. That summer I went to work as a camp counselor (and I continued through college). Everything I did built on becoming a teacher.

I didn’t, however, like teachers. I loathed my education classes at NYU. I felt we spent far too much time complaining about the education system in America, in New York. We read too many books and articles about super-teachers, women who I could not aspire to be because they had no lives outside of the classroom. The professors let the students gripe about their own classrooms far too often. It seemed, no matter what class I was enrolled in, the actual subject was just how awful teaching is.

My general negativity spilled over in to my other classes. I went from reading everything to not doing the assigned readings for any of my classes. I muddled through India and a class on genetics. I turned in half-finished papers that I didn’t proofread. I did terribly.

Deep into second semester I was voicing my concerns in one of the endless self-reflective papers that we write in teacher education classes. My professor found me in class. “Don’t be a teacher,” she said. Someone had said that to me once before, for different reasons. My senior year of high school we had a young permanent substitute for English. At the end of the year he asked where we were going, what we planned to do. When I said that I wanted to be an English teacher, he told me not to, that teaching books I loved to students who didn’t appreciate them would destroy me. I ignored him. But when my professor told me to get out of education, I listened to her.

I transferred in to the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. I majored in poetry with a minor in whatever else I wanted. I wouldn’t let words fail me. It seemed I wouldn’t be an English teacher, but I would still corral words. I would still read and write. I spent a semester in English immersed in words. I discovered the joy of the library, the wonders that doing the assigned reading can work, the convenience and economy of the reserve section. But those six months in England, I made no friends. I spoke, practically, to no one. I may have been working with words, but I was still failing.

My junior and senior years were foggy. I avoided my advisor because, really, what can you do with an individualized degree in poetry? I did well in workshop classes, surprisingly, because I didn’t speak. I did not defend my own poems or stories. I let them be ripped apart. All I had was words, written words. They could not fail.

I graduated, applied to MFA programs, was rejected. My words, my portfolio, failed. I took a job as a bank teller. My days were, for the first time, surrounded by numbers. A life without words was not one I wanted. I couldn’t imagine living as a poet. I was entirely unhappy out of the classroom. I had to be a teacher.

Without a proper degree, I had only one option as I saw it. I needed a Catholic school. I sent my resume out to all of the schools in the New York and Brooklyn Diocese. My words nearly failed, but one school called me in and hired me. It turns out, I am supposed to be a teacher. I’m good at it. I work with words all day and I love it. It seems I still love the art of teaching as well.

In English class we read, we play with poetry, we write, we speak. My students learn, they really do, through words. I have discovered how to make my words work for me. I teach my students how to make words work for them. Their words should never fail. They should never feel they are voiceless, helpless, like I did. I pay special attention to the quiet ones, the ones in the back of the classroom, sulking like me. We push through it. A classroom makes it possible. Words work.